Whirlpool engineers strike out.

[mattl]

Like many I have a lot of Whirlpool appliances in my home, 90% or so. Most are recent 5-10 years old. Silly things crop up that should not have occurred but this one really bugs me.

5 year old side by side fridge, TOL, very nice design overall. 3 40 watt interior lights in the fridge, 2 in the freezer. Last week one of the bulbs decided to burn out, not uncommon. But in the process it took out the main control board! No interior lights, but luckily the unit ran. Hard to function without lights in the fridge, so I was eating what ever was in front.

Did a bit of research and found the problem, the interior lights are controlled by the same circuit board that controls the compressor, defrost and ice maker. Board costs $120 on the Whirlpool site, got it from Appliance Zone parts, for $62 delivered ( highly recommend them appliancezone.com).

What makes me mad is the engineers must realize that bulbs burn out, sometimes with a "pop" that draws current - design for that. And there is no reason for the circuit board to control the lights in the first place. It has a "nice" function that turns out the lights if the door is open for more than 8-10 minutes, annoying if you are washing the fridge inside, useless in my opinion. If this happens again I will simply snip the wire and route it to AC since the switch the door operates does the work.

This could have turned into a $300+ service call, 1 trip out to find the problem, 1 to replace the board - which I'm sure would have to be ordered, and the full price of the part, all because a light bulb burned out.

 

[danemodsandy]

This Kind...

...Of idiocy is everywhere nowadays. I once had a Hoover canister vac - a Dimension, I think it was - that blew its motherboard. Cost-to-repair was about the same as a new unit. The "reason" for the motherboard, I learned, was to vary motor speed according to load, thus compensating for a bag partially full.

I now have a vintage vac, and trust me, it's a can, a fan, a switch and a motor inside, period. If the thing's suction falls off due to a partially filled bag, I will change the bag. There is no real reason for varying speed, digital readouts, "bag life" indicators or any other whiz-bang stuff on a vacuum cleaner. Anyone too dumb to check the bag and filter on a vac occasionally needs to be handed a broom - and you just have to hope they don't find a way to tear that up or hurt themselves with it.

 

[qsd-dan]

This Kind... ...Of idiocy is everywhere nowadays.

Yep, and it's only going to get worse......MUCH worse!

....and to think I was both impressed and fascinated with these complicated circuit boards back in the 80's. If I only knew......

 

[joelippard]

It disgusts me

to see what some things are coming to. As I have funds I'm buying up vintage things that were built to last, restoring them, and using them rather than buying new junk.

 

[westingman123]

>I'm buying up vintage things that were built to last< Me, too, but I'm afraid I may have to find a warehouse soon. So many cool things to save, so little space and time.

 

[petek]

Kinda one of the reasons I don't fly anymore unless I absolutely have to.

 

[gyrafoam]

And that is why you had better get the longest extended-warranty you can------- because nowadays its not a matter of IF, its a matter of WHEN you are going to need it.

Nevermind Clark Howard either. He gets paid to give advice he doesn't have to follow----- and he certainly won't be around to pick-up the tab if something goes wrong.

 

[toggleswitch2]

Modern electronic thermostats rely on two small "AA" sized batteries to call for heat.

It boggles the mind how much freezing damage can occur when one is on vacation / holday, should the batteries, and therefore the heat, fail in mid-winter.

In my house I had such an electronic thermostat for the main and upper floor (One zone). When I added hot-water heat to the basement, I was sure to get an old-fashioned Honeywell brand "round" [model/type name]thermostat, mercury be damned! it is accuate as hell and needs no batteries or outside power supply. As an added plus, as an analog device one is not limited to 1*F (1/2*C +/-) temeperature settings.

This way, if someone switched the upstairs thermostat to "off" or if the batteries in that thermostat fail, the heat in the basemement will prevent the pipes from freezing. [The Honeywell round [for heating applications only] does not have an "off" setting or position.

 

[norgeway]

everything is nuts now!!!

All you have to do is lift one side of a new stove,then come to my house and try to lift the pink Frigidaire or the 41 inch Norge...nuff said!!!

 

[peterh770]

Clark Howard is under the mistaken delusion that things made today have the same or better quality of things made 30 years ago.

 

[panthera]

Toggles,

Thank you! I have worried a lot about just that in my partner's house - sub -20F weather will cool things down if a thermostat fails fast enough that things can freeze and break in less than 4 hours.

I'll talk to him about it. Right now, the batteries get replaced regularly, but a non-electronic backup is a very, very good idea.

Need only be set to some very low temperature...and probably be wise to take the anticipator out of the circuit...

 

[mattl]

Many but not all...

My electronic thermostat relies on power from the furnace. Others I've seen/used had a battery but it was only for backing up the clock. I'd hate to depend on a couple of batteries to make sure the house stayed warm, bad idea, perfect for a Duracell ad.

 

[DADoES]

 
Mine (Carrier-branded) also pulls power from the low-voltage system transformer, and has a capacitor device for storing a bit of charge to maintain the time and settings during a power failure. How long that charge lasts, I don't know.

 

[jetcone]

Mine uses a battery

and I just change it every year like clock work, it hasn't failed in 18 years.

But I have had more trouble at the Cape where I do have a Honeywell Circle, the boiler throws a thermocouple every 5 years like clockwork and I come down to a no heat situation.
I have an alarm monitored if the house drops to 42 degrees. But the water is always shut off when I leave.

 

[gmmcnair]

Happy to say that.....

....none of my appliances, large or small, have motherboards, my thermostat is an old round Honeywell from eeons ago, and everything else has plain old controls.

Amazing how reliable things in my home are, if not high tech!

 

[jons1077]

GMmcnair,

Same here! My newest appliance is a 1990's Whirlpool portable dishwasher and it does very well. Everything else is 1984 or older and does a darn good job. I don't even know how old the thermostat is for the furnace but it's got to be at least 1940's or 1950's and it is spot on all the time. The old 1960's Singer cansiter vacuum we have has better suction that our shop vac. I'm really not kidding.

I can sit here and say buy warranties with your new appliances but, honestly, the only time I plan on buying a new appliance will be when I sell the house to someone else. Then they can have it and I'll take my old ones with me.

I was just in a Sears Outlet store a couple of weeks ago and I chuckled at the sales pitch I was overhearing. The prospective customers were looking down a FisherPaykel washer and the young 20-something salesgirl was giving the old reliability pitch. "This is direct drive which means no belts to break or replace causing costly repairs." That same day I had just replaced the belt on my GE filter flo. It was still using the original belt from 1968!!! The new one was only $6!!!

Anyways, if the general public want to continue throwing their money at garbage then so be it. If there's no belt to break then that leaves, hmm...a motor, circuit boards, anything expensive pretty much and those will go out within a year or two. (My Kenmore Elite stove lasted 9 months and my Kenmore Elite dishwasher motor went out after 1 year)

I'm more than happy to save an old reliable machine from going to a landfill.

Just my thought.

Jon

 

[DADoES]

 
The only electronics I've had go bad on appliances are a touchpad on my grandmother's Kenmore microwave (part NLA), and a motor board on a Calypso bought used. I have a Sharp micro with some segments dead on the scrolling VFL display but it otherwise works.

FWIW, my five F&P appliances (including the GE-made DE04 dryer) have not yet needed any repairs. GWL08 washer & DE04 dryer are 10 years 6 months old. DD603 is 6 years 6 months. IWL12 washer & DEGX1 dryer are 5 years 4 months, although the washer hasn't been used for about a year since I switched to the Calypso. The belt idler pulleys are beginning to wear on my DEGX1 (or perhaps a bit of lube is in order), which is a mechanical issue, not electronic. Calypso washer #2 and matching dryer are OK. GE Profile range, OTR micro, and SxS Arctica also are running with as yet no repairs at close to 6 years old.

Oh, and my plasma TV is now 7 years 5 months.

 

[danemodsandy]

DADoES:

Yes, but you dream of electric sheep ;-)

Seriously, you've obviously had decent luck with today's weird-science stuff. But I don't think that it's as reliable, on average, as older stuff was, and it can in no way be considered as environmentally benign. A toaster from yesteryear would rust away and its Bakelite break down in a landfill; its ceramic insulators and mica would be the main elements not subject to decomposition. A new one is mainly plastic that doesn't decompose readily, and its control board contains various toxic substances like dioxins and polychorinated biphenyls (PCBs).

I keep hoping that the light bulb will go on over peoples' heads, making them realise that reliability is a key factor in sustainability. If one discards a working pair of Maytag TL's (30-year reliability, extendable with rebuilding) in favour of a frontloader pair that uses less energy, but which ends up in a landfill in less than ten years, that's a net loss for the environment, not a gain, because the FL machines took more energy to manufacture than they used during their working lifetime.

Sadly, I think corporate shareholder concerns will keep reliability from being an overriding concern any time soon; our current business models are so tied to ever-upward growth that the only way to sustain them is through planned, indeed enforced, obsolescence.

All together now: "Ending is better than mending...ending is better than mending...The more stitches, the less riches..the more stiches, the less riches..."

 

[jeffg]

Well said, Sandy. Our first and hopefully only adventure into electronic washers was a Cabrio AGI, and within a week it was on its way back to Sears. Stunning lack of performance, and virtually no control over functionality. If you wanted to increase or decrease the wash time, it forced you to drain the tub and restart the entire wash cycle. Some energy savings!

The government can do what it wants, they'll have to pry our mechanical SQ TL from our cold dead hands before we'll part with it. And if mechanical TL's disappear completely we'll buy vintage.

 

[DADoES]

 
... said the men via messages transmitted from their electronic computers.

 

[danemodsandy]

DADoES:

Touché, of course - but remember that electronics are essential to computing as we know it. They weren't considered necessary to the processes of toasting bread or washing clothes until comparatively recently.

Everything Man does - including our beloved vintage appliances - has impacted or does impact upon the Earth. All I'm saying is that a little judiciousness would go a long way - do we really need a particular technology or material or process in a given application?

 

[danmantn]

Speaking of burned out bulbs and stupid engineering...Xenon headlight went out in my car and the bumper must be removed to get to the bulb! $390. UNREAL!

Actually, it's not stupid engineering, it's a sophisticated plan to force customers back in the dealership. Sickening.

 

[lordkenmore]

I have mixed feelings about electronics in appliances. On the one hand, they can potentially make things possible that aren't possible or practical with mechanical controls. I knew someone years back who had a Lady Kenmore washer with the pre-programmed cycle control via mechanical buttons. Whenever that thing was made (about 1970?), it was a top of the line product. Now one can get that sort of programmed cycle control in an entry level product.

Although, whether computer controls do enough to justify them is another question. A dishwasher that can monitor the cleaning and adjust for perfectly clean dishes with the least energy and water used might not be a bad idea. Unfortunately, it seems like many electronic systems really do nothing that wasn't done by even entry level mechanical controls. The new electronic controls are simply more marketable, and cheaper to implement.

The biggest practical minus I see with electronic controls are that repairs are considerably more difficult, and reliability can be a real problem. However, a lot of this is probably due to the way the technology is implemented. Frankly, the real problem that I see is simply how modern appliances, regardless of technology used, are flimsy and apparently designed not to be easily servicable. I replaced a door latch on one dishwasher that failed way too early. Another time, I was faced with flashing lights that said "I'm not happy! I won't work!" But, doing a Google search turned up no usable information. The lights could be anything from a loose connection, a sensor failure, a control pad failure, or control computer failure. Would it have killed the designer to have actually installed usable error codes that actually tell one something? In fact, with alpha-numeric displays, you could easily have it plain English so one would know where to start looking. "Water level sensor failure!" or "Keypad failure!" or "My warranty ended yesterday! I'm now going to totally blow up! Have a nice day!"

 

[lordkenmore]

"... said the men via messages transmitted from their electronic computers."

This has struck me as the irony of this site. We celebrate things old. In some cases, some people evidently have a house that is almost entirely vintage 1950 or 1960 something, from the iron to the TV. But we discuss our treasures using current technology.

Although, computers also illustrate my point above--a lot hinges not on technology but how it is applied. I still have and use some older hardware, and I'm impressed by how it keeps going and going and going compared to newer hardware. I have one computer made in the early 1990s that has had been used heavily, and--to date--has had only one failure (power supply). Everything else--including the hard drive--is original. I can't say that about this far newer computer. Unfortunately, newer is better for Internet. Although, maybe I should think of going retro for the Internet, too. I wonder how this site would render using Netscape 2.x?

 

[DADoES]

 
How's this?

 

[DADoES]

 
And this.

 

[lordkenmore]

Yes, that's what I was thinking of. I should have figured someone would have something like that, but I haven't seen that in any machine I've encountered.

What machine did these displays come from?

 

[DADoES]

The machine is my aforementioned Fisher & Paykel IWL12. The first two displays are examples of fault warnings that may occur during operation, accompanied by attention-calling beeps. The other screens are accessed via Diagnostic Mode. The Fault Code number requires a reference list to translate, but a tech sheet listing common codes is stashed inside the console. I've acquired service documentation that lists all the codes.

 

[toggleswitch2]

Keven:

Your idea for a "back-up" thermostat makes a great deal of sense. Sounds like you'd connect a good old-fashioned manual one is parallel to what exists now.

I laugh alos at new vehicle's interiro lkighting on a circuit board to dime the lights to off.

BUT WHY BLANCHE, WHY?

Will anyone DIE if the lights go from full-on to full-off in one second of time instead of a dim-down via a dimmer(dip-switch=> UK) "chip"?

Why complicate mechanicals? The KISS pricipal rules! LOL "Keep it Stupidly Simple" [The philosophy worked for Maytag washers for decades!]The benefits provided do(es) not equal or exceed the risk of problems / failure of the part(s).

 

[toggleswitch2]

I can spell, really!

editing= bad. Sorry, coffee not in me yet.

A B C D E F G

alpha, beta gamma, delta..............